Hyperparathyroidism and Good Branding

Hyperparathyroidism and good brandingWhat the heck is Hyperparathyroidism, and more importantly, what does this have to do with a website design and branding company?

Well, to be honest, I just learned about Hyperparathyroidism several months ago when I was diagnosed with it, and although I was hesitant to share about it, I thought that maybe someone reading this might be suffering from or know someone who is suffering from the same thing. Here is a link to a list of symptoms (http://parathyroid.com/parathyroid-symptoms.htm), my personal favorite being “Spouse claims you are more irritable and harder to get along with.”

Prior to a couple of months ago, I did not even know that we have four parathyroids, and learning that a couple of mine have gone bad was not a fun way to find out. Parathyroids are normally the size of a grain of rice, but a couple of mine had gone wacky and grown to about the size of a quarter. I hate to mention the word “tumor” as they were benign (and these type always are), but ultimately they had to be removed. These little dudes manage your calcium, and this had been playing havoc on my body for several years by pulling the calcium from my bones and putting it into my blood system. No amount of working out at the gym worked against the symptoms. The good news about this disease is that it is almost 100% curable, and once the buggers have been surgically removed, you can expect a quick turn around of the symptoms, dramatically changing life for the better.

I hate going to doctors, and I felt like a wimp telling my doctor “I feel old and my joints ache and I just don’t feel right.” I kept thinking that maybe I am being a baby and that I need to face the fact that I am 41 now and this is just the way it is – buck up! But thankfully I had friends who convinced me to talk with a doctor, and some blood tests showed very high calcium levels and PTH (parathyroid hormone) levels. From this, Dr. Nolte with Hillside Medicine (http://www.hillsidemedicine.com/) was able to make the diagnosis. He said that in all his years, I was the first of his patients to test positive for this disease, so it is not very common and quite under-diagnosed.

OFF TO FLORIDA

Although there are doctors here in Alaska who do the surgery, Dr. Nolte suggested that I go to the Norman Parathyroid Center http://parathyroid.com/about-Parathyroid.htm in Tampa Florida, to a specialist who only does this surgery and has the highest success rate in the country. I went ahead with the recommended surgery and have been back for several weeks. I am in the recovery process now, and am starting to feel the change in my body as my two remaining parathyroids begin to properly manage my calcium levels. I am still tired a lot, but heck – we have six-month-old triplets at home, and that is to be expected.

GOOD BRANDING
Although I have been recently focused on getting through the surgery and moving forward, I could not help but gain some good branding and marketing thoughts that I wanted to share that might help you better position your company to gain and serve your customers.

ParathyroidlogotopPROFESSIONAL LOGO
A well-designed logo can have a huge impact on how the identity of your organization is received, and the Norman Parathyroid Center’s logo accomplishes this well.

INFORMATIVE AND RELEVANT WEBSITE http://parathyroid.com
It is crucial to have quality and relevant content on your website and parathyroid.com’s site accomplishes this exceedingly well. One of the biggest reasons this is important is that the search engines look at all of a web site’s content and will often give you much better rankings if you include keywords that are relevant to your organization. Also, the content helps to establish the credibility of the organization, giving those who need the service the confidence to buy. parathyroid.com is actually a bit on the busy side and really needs a search feature to better manage the content, and Dr. Norman told me that they were working on employing a new site that will utilize a Content Management System that is the same as what we offer at Sundog Media.

SPECIALIZED SERVICES
You can only be great at a few things, and it pays to focus on niche areas that you can constantly get better at and establish yourself as the best within a particular industry. At Norman Parathyroid Center, all they do is this one surgery, and they have established themselves as the best in the nation, if not the world.

GREAT PROCESSES
From start to finish, all the processes went very smooth and consistently as I interacted with the variety of staff who were handling my case. You could tell that everyone was on the same page and had access to the same information and were very well educated within their specialty.

BELIEVE IN WHAT YOU DO
With a huge success rate and the amazing ability to dramatically change a person’s quality of life with a 20 minute surgery, you can imagine how much the team believed in what they were doing and were excited to be doing it. With a $13K price tag and the reality that they do 14 of these surgeries a day, I am sure that the profitability factor helped to fuel their enthusiasm as well. The lesson for me though, is that it is important to believe in our product and service and are constantly focusing on how to make improvements.

GOOD PEOPLE SKILLS
As straightforward as this seems, having good people skills is often one of the weakest links in all companies, and something we all need to revisit as we get busy with life and work. It is very important that we are responsive to our customers and treat everyone with respect.

Well, if you have read this far, I appreciate your time and hope that you have found it helpful. I especially hope that the information might help someone else that has the disease get diagnosed and cured.

Cheers,
Joe Law